Trajectory-Tracking Controller Design of Rotorcraft Using an Adaptive Incremental-Backstepping Approach

This paper treats a robust adaptive trajectory-tracking control design for a rotorcraft using a high-fidelity math model subject to model uncertainties. In order to control the nonlinear rotorcraft model which shows strong inter-axis coupling and high nonlinearity, incremental backstepping approach with state-dependent control effectiveness matrix is utilized. Since the incremental backstepping control suffers from performance degradation in the presence of control matrix uncertainties due to change of flight conditions, control system robustness is improved by combining the least squares parameter estimator to estimate time varying uncertainties contained in the control effectiveness matrix. Also, by selecting a suitable gain set by investigating the error dynamics, a uniform trajectory-tracking performance over operational flight envelope of the rotorcraft is ensured without resorting to the conventional gain scheduling method. To evaluate the proposed controller, comparative results between IBSC and Adaptive IBSC are provided in this paper with sequential maneuvers from the ADS-33E-PRF. The proposed method shows improved tracking performance under variations in control effective matrix in the flight simulation. Robust and stable parameter estimation is also guaranteed due to the implementation of the DF-RLS algorithm for the least squares estimator.